What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2012-6538

• Severity: low (CVSS 1.9 v2.0)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 0.3% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2013-03-15 · updated 2026-06-16
• Weakness: CWE-200

Description

The copy_to_user_auth function in net/xfrm/xfrm_user.c in the Linux kernel before 3.6 uses an incorrect C library function for copying a string, which allows local users to obtain sensitive information from kernel heap memory by leveraging the CAP_NET_ADMIN capability.

Affected products

• Linux kernel: through 3.5.7; 3.0-rc1, 3.0-rc2, 3.0-rc3, 3.0-rc4, 3.0-rc5, 3.0-rc6 (+183)
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux: 6.0

References

• http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git%3Ba=commit%3Bh=4c87308bdea31a7b4828a51f6156e6f721a1fcc9
• http://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2013-0744.html
• http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2013/03/05/13
• https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/4c87308bdea31a7b4828a51f6156e6f721a1fcc9
• https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v3.x/patch-3.6.bz2
• http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git%3Ba=commit%3Bh=4c87308bdea31a7b4828a51f6156e6f721a1fcc9
• http://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2013-0744.html
• http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2013/03/05/13
• https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/4c87308bdea31a7b4828a51f6156e6f721a1fcc9
• https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v3.x/patch-3.6.bz2

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